When the Environment Court reconvenes this month for Meridian’s Project Hayes case, it will hear from leading international climate scientists whose evidence will challenge the credibility of the popular view that man made carbon dioxed causes dangerous global warming.

Aucklander Roch Sullivan, who is calling the scientists to give evidence in support of his appeal, says that Meridian and Government rely heavily on the benefits of mitigating the effects of manmade global warming as a justification for the wind farm. But, as Sullivan says: “if the wind farm does not stack up from an economic point of view, and if the theory of man-made global warming fails to survive serious scientific scrutiny, how can Meridian or the Government responsibly spend billions of tax-payers’ money to build it?”

Meridian and the Government argue that carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuelled electricity generation will cause dangerous global warming. This belief drives the Government’s 10 year moratorium on new fossil fuel power stations, and has led generators like Meridian to build wind farms to meet the urgent need for new generation. Legislation before Parliament (the Emissions Trading Scheme) includes the moratorium as well as a tax on carbon dioxide emissions. Sullivan says that these proposals will penalise existing thermal generators, and cause a substantial increase in the cost of power to consumers and provide windfall profits to hydro generators.

The experts to be called by Sullivan will give evidence that the science on man-made global warming is far from settled, and that the latest available evidence shows that the most recent phase of “global warming” ceased at the end of the 20th century. If this cooling continues as expected, then the claimed environmental benefits of the Project Hayes Wind farm, and of wind generation in general, are illusory.

Professor Bob Carter, a Research Professor at James Cook University in Queensland, will give his expert opinion commenting on Meridian’s evidence which supports the IPCC view that man made greenhouse gases cause dangerous global warming. Prof. Carter has previously given evidence as an expert witness in the benchmark UK case which identified nine major errors of fact or reasoning contained in Mr Al Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth” (http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Admin/2007/2288.html)

Other expert witnesses will include Dr Chris de Freitas a respected and well-known climate scientist from Auckland University, Dr. Kesten Green from Monash University in Melbourne, and power consultant and engineer Bryan Leyland from Auckland.

Dr De Freitas will show that post-European changes in New Zealand climate fall within the bounds of previous natural variation, and that any future warming effect from increases in carbon dioxide will be minimal.

Dr Green will present an analysis of the climate models used by the IPCC, and show that none of them can be regarded as “scientific” or reliable.

Bryan Leyland will provide recent evidence from overseas wind generation projects that the cost of the wind farm will be substantially greater than estimated by Meridian and the cost of power from it is likely to be much higher than from viable and sustainable alternative generation. He will also provide evidence to demonstrate that the wind farm will need substantial backup which, in a dry year, cannot be provided by existing hydro stations.

Sullivan believes Project Hayes could turn out to be a landmark case in relation to “climate change”.

Sullivan does not represent any group or organisation but has chosen at his own expense to oppose Project Hayes on the grounds that it is ‘not in the national interest’.

ENDS

Witness Bios

Professor Bob Carter

Ph.D., University of Cambridge, Palaeontology, 1968.
B.Sc. (Hons), University of Otago, Geology, 1963.

Professor Carter graduated from Otago University in 1963 with an honours and received a PHD from Cambridge University in 1968. He was a Senior lecturer in Geology at Otago until 1981 and went on to became Head of Earth Sciences at James Cook University. Since 2000 Carter has been Adjunct Research Professor in the Marine Geophysical Laboratory and School of Earth Sciences, James Cook University, and also for a period Adjunct Research Professor in the School of Environmental and Earth Sciences, University of Adelaide.

His research interests are stratigraphy; marine geology, and molluscan palaeontology; the effects of sea-level change on the development of sedimentary rocks; and the history of climate change over the last 65 million years.
He is author or co-author of numerous research publications worldwide in his area of expertise.

He has been a Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Mining & Metallurgy (FAusIMM); is a lifetime Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand (Hon. FRSNZ); and has received an Outstanding Research Career award from the Geological Society of New Zealand.

Carter has also acted as a member of the Editorial Board of Geo-Marine Letters; of the New Zealand Journal of Geology & Geophysics, and of ODP Leg 181 Publications; and is frequently asked to act as a referee for leading science journals and national research funding agencies. He has been an invited speaker, at, inter alia, the Geological Societies of London, Germany, and New Zealand, and has been Bennison distinguished overseas lecturer for the American Association of Petroleum Geologists.

A former Chairman of the Science & Engineering Panel of the Australian Research Council; of the Australian Marine Science & Technology Advisory Committee; and of the Australian ODP Secretariat; and a former member of the Crown-of-Thorns Advisory Committee and of the Ocean Drilling Program international Planning and Operations Committees, he has also served as a member of the Australian National Committee on Geology, and Vice-President of the Australian Federation of Scientific and Technological Societies.

His research career has been supported by grants from competitive public research agencies, especially the Australian Research Council (ARC), from whom he has received a Special Investigator Award. Professor Carter receives no research funding from special interest organisations such as environmental groups, energy companies or government departments.

Chris de Freitas received his early education in Trinidad, West Indies. He completed Bachelors and Masters degrees at the University of Toronto, Canada and PhD at the University of Queensland, Australia, as a Commonwealth Doctoral Scholar. Each of these degrees involved thesis research on topics in Climatology.
Currently he is an Associate Professor in School of Geography and Environmental Science at University of Auckland in New Zealand. During his time at the University of Auckland he has served as Deputy Dean of Science, Head of Science and Technology and four years as Pro Vice Chancellor. He has been Vice President of the Meteorological Society of New Zealand and is a founding member of the Australia New Zealand Climate Forum. Since 1996 he has been an editor of the international journal Climate Research. From 1999-2001, he served on the Executive Board of the International Society of Biometeorology.

Chris’ research interests cover a variety of themes in the area of climate and the environment. A selection of his publications categorised below gives an indication of the scope of his work. In addition to these, he has written extensively in the popular literature and press on a range of environment-related themes, including air quality, flood and drought hazards, climate change and environmental conservation. In recognition of this, He is three times the recipient of the NZ Association of Scientists, Science Communicator Award, and once the recipient of a New Zealand Association of Scientists Science Communicator Merit Award.
He is co-author of over 200 publications on Environmental themes and has over 30 years in University based research.

de Freitas, C.R. and K. Banbury, 1999: Build up and diffusion of carbon dioxide in cave air in relation to visitor numbers at the Glowworm Cave, New Zealand. In: Cave Management in Australasia XIII. Proceedings of the Thirteenth Australasian Conference on Cave and Karst Management, Mount Gambier, South Australia. Australasian Cave and Karst Management Association, Carlton South, Victoria, 84-89.

de Freitas, C.R. and A.A. Schmekal, 2003: Condensation as a microclimate process: Measurement and prediction in the Glowworm Tourist Cave, New Zealand.’ International Journal of Climatology, 23 (5), 557-575.
Natural Hazards
de Freitas, C.R., 1975: Estimation of the disruptive impact of snowfall in urban areas. Journal of Applied Meteorology, 14, 1166-1173.

de Freitas, C.R., 1989: The hazard potential of drought for the population of the Sahel . In Population and Disaster, J.I. Clark, P. Curson, S.L. Kayasha and P. Nag (eds.), Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 98-113.

de Freitas, C.R., 2002: Theory, concepts and methods in tourism climate research. In: A. Matzarakis and C.R. de Freitas (eds.), Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Climate, Tourism and Recreation. Porto Carras , Greece, October 2001. International Society of Biometeorology, Commission on Climate Tourism and Recreation. Porto Carras, Halkidiki, Greece, WP01, 3-20.

de Freitas, C.R., 2003: Tourism climatology: evaluating environmental information for decision making and business planning in the recreation and tourism sector. International Journal of Biometeorology, 48 (1), 45-54.

Kesten Green is a Senior Research fellow at Monash University’s Business and Economic Forecasting Unit in Australia.
He was founder and director in 1985 of Infometrics Limited and in 1982 a founder and director of the publisher Better Informed, a computerized horse-race forecasting magazine. He has been involved in research o forecasting more-or-less continually ever since.

In 1995 he founded the firm Decision Research Ltd.

In 2003 Kesten obtained a PHD from Victoria University in Wellington for a comparison of forecasting methods. One of the articles based on that research was awarded ‘International Journal of forecasting ‘ Best Paper for 2002-2003.
He is co-owner and co-director of the public service forecast information website www.forecastingprinciples.com to encourage the use of scientific forecasting for the public policy decisions.

He is a member of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), the Desiciosn Analysis Society, the International Association for Conflict Management (IACM), the Society for Judgment and decision Making (SJDM), and the International Institute of Forecasters (IIF). He is on the editorial board of the IIF journal Foresight: The International Journal of Applied Forecasting.

Bryan Leyland is a former Principal of Sinclair Knight Merz, a multi-disciplinary engineering consultancy based in Auckland. He holds the qualification of Master of Science (Power System Design), and is a Fellow of the Institution of Electrical Engineers (U.K), a Fellow of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (U.K), a Fellow of the Institution of Professional Engineers (N.Z).

He was awarded the Institution of Professional Engineers “Supreme Technical Award” in 2005, the IPENZ “Communicator of the year” in 2001 and the Institution of Electrical Engineers Silver Medal in 2005. Leyland was also awarded the Electricity Engineers Association “Meritorious Service Award” in 2004 and was made an Honorary Life Member of the Association in 2005. He was a Director of Vector Limited (New Zealand largest Electricity Distribution Company) from 2003 – 2005.

He is currently a Member of the Common Quality Advisory Group of the Electricity Commission. This group advises the Electricity Commission on factors affecting the operation of the New Zealand power system. The group has a special interest in the effect of intermittent generation such as windpower on the operation of the New Zealand power system.

Leyland was also a member of an International Panel of Experts which was formed to identify, investigate and solve major engineering problems at a 2000 MW hydroelectric power station in Iran.
Currently he is a member of the Expert Advisory Group for the 5900 MW Kalpasar tidal power scheme north of Mumbai in India, which if built will be about 15 times larger than the largest tidal power scheme in operation.

He has had an active interest in windpower since about 1980, when assisting with the mechanical and electrical aspects of costing a large wind farm using vertical axis wind turbines. He is widely versed in all aspects of Wind Energy and has collated a large database of articles describing the cost and performance of existing wind farms and their effects on the operation of the power system.

He was a member of a group called together by the New Zealand government to give advice regarding the 2003 electricity shortage.
He has in the past consulted to Meridian Energy on the options for connecting the proposed Project Aqua hydropower scheme to the transmission system, and was able to propose alternatives that would have resulted in a considerable cost reduction to the design of that project had it gained resource consent..

His particular expertise is as an Electrical and Mechanical Engineer in power system operation and optimisation, transmission systems, distributed generation, hydropower generation, thermal power stations, cogeneration, and power system design and protection. From 1992 until 2003 he was responsible for biannual reviews of electricity supply and demand in New Zealand. Those documents are still the only publicly available comprehensive and independent review.

Over the last fifteen years he has made numerous presentations at conferences and written articles for newspapers on power planning, the problems faced by the New Zealand electricity system, the risk of shortages resulting from insufficient generating capacity and the risk of blackouts resulting from an overloaded transmission system. As well as been interviewed for radio and television news programmes on these subjects.

This article is the work of the source indicated. Any opinions expressed in it are not necessarily those of National Wind Watch.

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